LAEP celebrates 75 years
Mikayla Kapp photo. LAEP students designed the fountain area next to the Aggie terrace in 2010.
Utah State University’s landscape architecture program celebrated its 75 year anniversary last weekend. The program hosted a series of events from banquets to canoeing to presentations for its alumni and staff.
“We’ve been in the works planning this for about two years with a formal committee,” said Pam George, academic advisor for the landscape architecture program or LAEP. “We had a bunch of alumni help plan for this event, so between that committee and our department we all sat down and figured out what we thought the alumni would like to do for the weekend.”
Almost 250 alumni came back, which is roughly 20 percent of LAEP alums.
The reunion planning helped the program and current students because of the presence of the alums.
“[The students] have been really excited to be able to network with the professionals that are here from all over the country and it’s given them great opportunities,” George said. “I think it’s definitely elevated the whole department. Everybody is really excited.”
LAEP has alumni working in 44 states and 15 countries.
“It’s great because now the alumni are really wanting to come back and donate their time and their money,” George said. “We’ve created a bunch of new scholarships over the last two years because of this. It’s kind of trickling all the way down from the alumni being excited all the way to the student population.”
The program came to USU in 1939 when a landscape architecture professor at Brigham Young University moved the entire program to Logan.
“That first graduating class had two people: a female and a male,” George said. “So we were already this unique program because most landscape architecture programs is mostly male dominated.”
George said the celebration is not just a time to reflect, but a chance to think about the future.
“We have a motto towards a century of excellence. So we are looking not just right now at the 75th, but what’s going to happen for the next 25 years when we hit our century mark and where we are taking this department and how are we taking it forward,” she said. “So I think everybody has kind of caught fire with that and is really excited with the prospects of where we are going.”
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